The cast of Spotlight celebrate winning the Oscar for Best Picture Photo: Naomi Watts

Morgan Freeman announced the result and held us all in suspense.

It's long been assumed that The Revenant would win the golden trio - Best Actor, Best Director and Best Picture - but thanks to Spotlight, Alejandro González Iñárritu's survivalist thriller only won two out of three.

Spotlight, co-written and directed by Tom McCarthy, was an early Oscar front-runner since screening at the Toronto International Film Festival in October. Our reviewer, Tim Robey, said of the movie: "Spotlight is a journalism procedural thriller in which the thrills and procedure are one and the same thing.

The excitement comes from the joining of disparate dots: a stray comment leads to a tentative telephone call, which leads in turn to a halting conversation in a coffee shop. Some of these leads are yet more dots, while others are the lines that link them – and over the course of two hours, you watch the bigger picture gradually and methodically take shape.

"The picture in this case is the systematic concealment by the Catholic Church in Boston of its decades-long, state-wide dealings with almost 100 paedophile priests – and McCarthy’s film, a serious Best Picture contender at this year’s Oscars and Baftas, follows four reporters on the city’s Globe newspaper who spent two years painstakingly pinning down the story.

"Both visually and verbally, Thomas McCarthy’s film is almost obstinately unshowy: Aaron Sorkin would probably nod off during the prologue. But much like All The President’s Men – which is, of course, a significant and unavoidable influence – Spotlight finds a thrilling and absorbing anti-glamour in journalistic spadework, and the tactile movement of analogue information through filing cabinets and photocopiers."